I love to make my clients cry.
Controversial. But true!
When they cry I know we’ve landed on something powerful that’s going to change their mind, behaviour and life going forward for the better.
Think about it this way …
How many times as a kid were you told to toughen up? Or to stop crying? Or to stop being a baby?
And what did that teach you? That emotions shouldn’t be expressed, or at least not in their fullest form.
So we bottle them up. We condition ourselves to stop fully feeling. We lose touch with our emotional qualities. We build up a wall of defence, a wall of denial. Blocking out emotions because we have learnt that some emotions are bad or that expressing them is a sign of weakness. But therein lies the problem – our body can’t distinguish which emotions to block out so it limits them all.
Yet here’s the thing … NO EMOTION IS BAD. Every emotion is our body’s way of telling or teaching us something. If we learn to listen to our emotional response and ask why we feel this way, we understand ourselves so much better.
Think of emotions coming and going like waves in the sea. Constantly ebbing and flowing. Yet if we believe that some emotions are bad or that we shouldn’t express them, we begin to build up our sea defences to stop them. But what that ends up doing is stopping ALL emotions from being felt fully, including the ones we really want to be feeling that make us feel good.
Denying an emotion from being acknowledged, expressed and released means we suppress it and hold on to it. It doesn’t go away just because we choose to try and ignore it. The energy this takes eats away at us, little by little. It uses up our emotional capacity leaving less room to both give and receive the ‘good’ feelings and emotions.
So what would you rather do … hold onto anger, frustration, fear, resentment in this wall of emotional defence because you feel it makes you look like a bad or weak person, or it’s socially unacceptable, or too painful to deal with? Or listen to your body, acknowledge how you’re feeling, learn to recognise, deal with and accept every emotion that comes your way and in doing so increase your capacity for joy, true love, inner peace and fulfilment?
When we cry our tears are an expression of emotion. They are our body’s natural way of releasing pent up emotions and stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system to allow us to release and find calmness again. They can help us heal and accept, forgive and move on.
So the reason I love to see or hear that my clients have cried is because they’ve released some emotion and are ready to move on. It means they’re freeing up energetic space to allow them to begin to step into their true selves and accept more confidence, success, happiness, love or whatever goodness they truly wish for.
Some of the activities I get my clients to do on my AWAKEN program that helps them deal with over-working, over-giving and overwhelm causes them to cry because we unravel the limiting beliefs and emotions they’ve been denying and suppressing for so frickin’ long (often going as far back as childhood and often unknown to them). Together we knock down their wall of defence.
But the beauty of doing this with me is that we have weekly coaching calls to give them the support they need as they work through their emotions and reframe their limiting beliefs. We work together through my purposefully designed activities and personalised hypnotherapy to enable lasting, positive change in self-esteem, self-belief, self-trust and confidence. They come out the other side understanding themselves so much more deeply and compassionately than they’ve ever done before. And when that happens often it’s the tears of joy and gratitude that flow, as they realise what they’ve been capable of all along.
Good tears that mean they no longer hold themselves back. (And I especially love those kind!)
My AWAKEN* program is designed especially for folks who are sabotaging their own success by over-giving, over-thinking or over-doing. Contact me for details (or look on this website for more info) and take a step towards enjoying more confidence, balance and ease in your life AND making it feel more fun and fulfilling.
With love, Jo xx
*A box of tissues is not included in this program, but bags of my care and support are.